India has taken its manuscript digitisation drive overseas. The Ministry of Culture and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), France’s national library, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding under the Gyan Bharatam Mission to identify, digitise and share Indic-origin manuscripts and collections held in Paris, and to work together on the technology needed to preserve and read them.
The MoU was signed and exchanged in Paris on 26 October 2026 by Vivek Aggarwal, Secretary, Ministry of Culture, and Gilles Pécout, President of BnF, the Ministry said in a statement released through the Press Information Bureau on 27 October.
Five areas of cooperation
The agreement sets up a framework across five areas: digitisation, cross-sharing on the National Digital Repository, technology exchange, conservation, and research and development. On the Indian side, the partnership brings in Gyan Bharatam along with the National Archives of India in New Delhi and the National Library in Kolkata.
The core task is practical. The two sides will locate Indic-origin manuscripts and collections in BnF’s holdings and digitise them, with the digital copies feeding into India’s National Digital Repository.
OCR and HTR tools for Indian scripts
The technology strand is the one with the clearest digital-governance angle. The MoU provides for exchange of expertise in digitisation and preservation technologies, cataloguing standards, optical character recognition (OCR) and handwritten text recognition (HTR) tools for Indian scripts, and digital humanities. Machine reading of handwritten material in Indian scripts remains a hard problem, and shared tooling and standards could make large digitised collections searchable rather than just stored as images.
Manuscript conservation, joint workshops, capacity-building programmes, research projects, publications, exhibitions and exchanges of scholars and experts are also envisaged.
Building a national repository
Gyan Bharatam is the Ministry of Culture’s flagship mission for the identification, documentation, conservation, digitisation, translation, research and dissemination of India’s manuscript heritage. Its National Digital Repository is planned as a secure store for Indian-origin manuscripts and Indian Knowledge Systems held in India and abroad, with structured, permission-based access for research and study.
A large share of India’s written heritage sits in foreign libraries and archives. Agreements like this one give the repository a route to bring those collections into a single, governed digital platform, while keeping access controlled and standards consistent with material digitised at home.
The Ministry described the partnership as an important step in international cooperation on preserving and studying India’s manuscript heritage, and said it would open new room for scholarly and technological collaboration.